Existential Psychotherapy [Hardcover]
Author: Irvin D. Yalom | Language: English | ISBN: 0465021476 | Format: PDF, EPUB
Existential Psychotherapy
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Existential therapy has been practiced and continues to be practiced in many forms and situations throughout the world. But until now, it has lacked a coherent structure, and analysis of its tenets, and an evaluation of its usefulness. Irvin Yalom, whose Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy has rendered such a service to that discipline since 1970, provides existential psychotherapy with a background, a synthesis, and a framework.Organized around what Yalom identifies as the four “ultimate concerns of life”—death, freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness—the book takes up the meaning of each existential concern and the type of conflict that springs from our confrontation with each. He shows how these concerns are manifested in personality and psychopathology, and how treatment can be helped by our knowledge of them.Drawing from clinical experience, empirical research, philosophy, and great literature, Yalom has written a broad and comprehensive book. It will provide an intellectual home base for those psychotherapists who have sensed the incompatability of orthodox theories with their own clinical experience, and it opens new doors for empirical research. The fundamental concerns of therapy and the central issues of human existence are woven together here as never before, with intellectual and clinical results that will surprise and enlighten all readers.
- Hardcover: 544 pages
- Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (December 8, 1980)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0465021476
- ISBN-13: 978-0465021475
- Product Dimensions: 1.6 x 6.5 x 9.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #114,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
As a psychiatrist, I have yet to read a more illuminating book on how mental illnesses can develop, and how to help patients' to become free of them.
Existential Psychotherapy presents a theory of the existential forces that drive all human beings--knowledge of death, of our aloneness in the world, and of "meaninglessness" (the utter inconsequence of our one life in the entirety of the universe). It shows how these forces are powerful influences in shaping human mental health and illness.
Other reviewers here point out that the basic existential issues Yalom presents are well-known to academics and to many literate people who are exposed to them in that good, broad, liberal arts education we (still?) get in college. But what Yalom achieves in this book, has not to my knowledge been accomplished before (nor since): a presentation of these ideas to an audience of clinicians in a lucid, beautifully written, way that is salient to the daily practice of psychotherapy.
Yalom is a rare psychiatrist who is not only a master of the art of teaching and practicing psychiatry, but for this book, ventured into philosophy, literature, history, and sociology, and then integrated the wisdom each brings to the study of human nature, into a clear and cohesive whole, a beautifully written theory of the existential dimension of men's fears, drives, and actions, and how this dimension creates mental illness or health, depending on how each person handles it.
What is amazing is how such a book is now buried in the archives of (relative) obscurity, while others, recycling the same old tired ideas, reign on.
Yalom follows Rollo May in making Existentialism accessible to American psychotherapists. The introduction clearly explains the need for doing so. Freudian-based therapy, Behavioral therapy, and the anti-intellectual forms of humanistic therapy, all have limitations in the areas that existential psychotherapy may shine at.
As he states in the Epilogue, Yalom regards "this existential paradigm as an early formulation..." that will "not only be useful to clinicians in its present form, but will stimulate the discourse necessary to modify and enrich it." What Yalom has done is to select four significant existentialist concerns (death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness) and discuss them in the context of his experiences with clients, the writings of major Existentialists, and other therapies. In doing so, it may become clear what Existentialism has to offer to psychotherapy. Although this introductory work may be rich enough to, by itself, benefit clinicians, the interested reader can also then turn to the rich literature in Existentialism and existential psychotherapy, guided by Yalom's focus on death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.
As a work of introduction, it seems understandable that, although he quotes Sarte, Yalom doesn't present Sartre's existential psychoanalysis, not even (it seems) Sartre's analysis of "bad faith" or Sartre's existential analysis of Jean Genet. Yalom said in the introduction that he did not intend to discuss existentialist philosophy much, but rather focus on what would be helpful for clinicians. Although Sartre's work in the area of existential psychoanalysis is ignored, as well as British psychiatrist R.D.
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